Over the past week, I’ve been working on updating the packages on my home machine. I’m running Gentoo, and have for the most part ignored emerge -u world until this week. I finally took the plunge to actually read about it, and after fixing some blocking packages (Yes, you can emerge -C mozilla-thunderbird without it wiping out your existing mail and profile) I started it up.
After about a day and a half of running (including some various errors) I noticed my desktop was behaving a little strangely. So I logged out, so I could reboot. Then X crashed. And stayed crashed. Nothing I could do would get it back up and running.
After about 10 hours of working on trying to get it back up, I decided to just let emerge update my entire Gnome install, and 14 hours later, rebooted and everything is back up and running. I like the updated Gnome too (coming from 2.4 Gnome to 2.10 Gnome is a nice improvement!).